I'm sure you wonít be surprised to hear that copious quantities of bacon were served. However, I'm sad to say that I didnít actually get to feast on the porcine ambrosia myself, because it was my privilege to lead the discussion as to the possibility of a forthcoming robot apocalypse. Happily, we had a lot of brain-power to throw at this problem, including input from a bona fide expert in robotics, a NASA scientist, an engineer from CERN, and... well, more brains than you could throw a stick at.

As part of this discussion, I presented a suggested reading list of books that I felt were in some way pertinent to the subject. Following my talk, a number of people asked me for this reading list, and now I'm being barraged with emails reminding me of my promise to provide the little rascal, all of which prompted me to write this blog.

Before I present you with my reading list, however, let's pause for a moment to peruse and ponder a few photographs from the occasion. These were taken towards the end of my part of the presentation, just before I threw the discussion open to the floor. It was around this time that I noted the robot uprising could already have started, unbeknownst to us in our salon conference room with its set of humongous, soundproof wooden doors.

"For all we know," I said, "robots could be rampaging throughout the conference center as we speak." I went on to note that our opening of the doors could attract the robots attention -- and not in a good way. On the bright side, I was equipped with my "travelling moustache" -- a cunningly carved little beauty on the end of a stick.

I have supreme confidence that seeing such a "genuine counterfeit moustache" would throw even the most sophisticated of positronic brains into disarray and turmoil. Rather than trying to find a logical explanation to this capricious conundrum, the robots would prefer to pretend that I simply wasn't there and would use advanced image-processing algorithms to filter me out of the scene -- we might think of this as a (patent-pending) moustache-based invisibility cloak, if you will. Remember that you heard this technique here first.

Fortunately, by some strange quirk of fate, I happened to have a large number of rolls of aluminum foil about my person. The idea was for everyone who was not in possession of a travelling moustache to create an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (AFDB) for themselves. In addition to the fact that the metallic nature of these beanies would give any self-respecting robot pause for thought, I am assured that they are also extremely efficacious against all forms of electromagnetic and psychotronic attack. (It is for this reason that my dear old mother wonít be seen out of doors without one mounted firmly on her noggin.)

AFDBs have the additional advantage that they protect the wearer against brain-scanning and mind-reading incursions. Of course, it goes without saying that -- in order to minimize the risk of mental enslavement -- one should never buy a commercial AFDB from a site like eBay. This is because AFDBs from unknown sources may contain pinholes and other backdoors that may actually facilitate nefarious parties taking control of one's mind.

In the following images, we see my enrapt audience hanging on to my every word. I think it's obvious they had realized that -- should the robot situation go "pear-shaped" -- I was their best hope for survival.

Hawaiian shirts are also a great defense -- they leadthe robots to mistake the wearers for potted plants(Click here to see a larger image.)

Can you think of a suitable caption for this image?(Click here to see a larger image.)

Here we see the cream of the embedded engineering cropgirding up their loins and preparing for action(Click here to see a larger image.)

But we digress... So, without further dilly-dallying or shilly-shallying, let's proceed to my suggested reading list in the order in which I introduced these little beauties during my talk.